Friday, September 26, 2008

matters of scale: Big in Japan

In the page on the right we see Iron Man next to the open hand of Grogg, the cow-faced megalosaurus. If we assume that Iron Man is about six feet tall, we could say that the span of Grogg's hand is a little over twice that, or roughly 15 feet wide. I did a cursory measurement of how many spans tall I am: about eight and a half. 8 1/2 times 15 equals 127.5 feet tall (or a little taller--he may be taller in relation to his hands than I am): about as tall as a 12-story building. So the size of his hand is consistent with the image on the left, where he is standing with his hands on top of a couple of buildings, but a few others are taller than he is. He is about as tall as a medium-size building in downtown Tokyo.

Seth talked to me a little bit about scale when he was drawing these monsters. He said that people don't know whether these monsters are 30 feet tall, or hundreds of feet tall. So he had to make that decision himself, and then make them consistent. There are places where he varied from that scale, either to make a point about HUGENESS, or just to play with scale. But when he did that, he did it deliberately.